Introduction: Glimpsing the Future University

Does the future university await or is it to be designed? Will it just come upon us or does it lend itself to action in the here-and-now, striving to bring about change? The easy answer is that it is a bit of both. University leadership, it may be said, takes on precisely this character, an imagining of future possibilities and the orchestration of their management. All the while, those efforts at building towards espied futures will be understood to unfold within a turbulent world order, an unstable situation exacerbated by universities being—to some degree or other—global institutions. There can never be a sure path to any envisaged future for a university. No matter how much insight accrues from imaginative efforts and no matter how carefully planned and managed, university action plans are always liable to being undermined by unforeseen— and indeed unforeseeable—exigencies.